money whenever individual states needed it because “the accomplishment of such improvement was for the general good, although local points received the immediate advantage.”55
Already Lincoln was outlining the big-spending, activist government he would call for in the 1850s and would put into operation during the Civil War. But he wanted government spending to be directed toward useful projects such as infrastructure and, later on, toward preserving the Union and freeing the enslaved. In President James Polk, he saw the government directing funds in an ill-considered direction.
In the fall of 1847, he did not yet vocally make the connection between expansionism and the spread of slavery. Actually, he seemed to retreat to conservativism on slavery for the moment, if his willingness to serve as an attorney for the Kentucky slaveholder Robert Matson that October is an indication.
Soon enough, on his trip east to Washington, DC, to take his seat in Congress in December, he would gain full exposure to antislavery interpretations of the Mexican War.
Before leaving Springfield, he rented the Jackson Street house to a brick contractor for ninety dollars a year. On October 25, he, Mary, and the two boys set off on a trip by steamboat and train to Lexington, Kentucky, where they had arranged to stay for three weeks with her family. A local paper reported:
Mr. Lincoln, the member of Congress elect from this district, has just set out on his way to the city of Washington. His family is with him; they intend to visit their friends and relatives in Kentucky before they take up the line of march for the seat of government. He will find many men in Congress who possess twice the good looks, and not half the good sense, of our own representative.56
On one stretch of the journey, the four-year-old Bobby and eighteen-month-old Eddie got so boisterous in a railroad car that they upset other passengers. A nephew of Mary’s stepmother, who accompanied the Lincolns part of the way, declared on arriving at Lexington, “I was never so glad to get off a train in my life. There were two lively youngsters on board who kept the whole train in a turmoil, and their long-legged father, instead of spanking the brats, looked pleased as Punch and aided and abetted the older one in mischief.”57
Lincoln had the opportunity to witness slavery firsthand in Lexington, with its auction block and whipping post in the public square, its slave jails, the coffles that were led along the road in front of the Todd house, and the operations of firms like Bolton, Dickens and Co., one of the largest slave traders in the South.
And surely he got food for thought when, on a dark, rainy November day, he went to hear a speech given by his political idol, Henry Clay. In his speech, Clay, who was launching his fourth run for the White House, described the Mexican War as a war “of offensive aggression, . . . actuated by a spirit of rapacity,” which “might have been averted by prudence, moderation, and wise statesmanship.”58 Though a slaveholder himself, he declared, “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil, a wrong; . . . I should rejoice if not a single slave breathed the air or was within the limits of our country.” But he opposed immediate emancipation, which, he said, would cause “collisions and conflicts between the two races, shocking scenes of rapine and carnage, [and] the extinction or expulsion of the blacks.” For this reason, radicals who demanded immediate abolition “have done incalculable mischief even to the very cause which they espoused, to say nothing of the discord which has been produced between different parts of the Union.” He recommended gradual abolition and colonizing freed blacks abroad, but he insisted that, according to the Constitution, slavery must be left alone in the states where it already existed.
If we omit Clay’s prediction of a racial war that would supposedly follow immediate emancipation, his message that day—antiextensionism, permitting slavery where it already existed, and gradual emancipation followed by colonization—pretty much defined Lincoln’s position on slavery until the early part of the Civil War.
Lincoln was not yet ready to express openly this position in 1847. But Clay’s words doubtless stayed in his mind as he witnessed the congressional debates over the Mexican War and slavery.
THE CONGRESSIONAL CAULDRON
Lincoln’s term as a Whig representative in the Thirtieth Congress (1847–49) is commonly seen as unremarkable. He emerged from it as “Spotty Lincoln,” the “Ranchero Spotty of one term”—nicknames assigned to him by contemporary journalists because of his Spot Resolutions, in which he discredited the Mexican War by demanding that President James Polk identify the geographical spot where American blood had been shed that had launched the conflict.59 If it was in the United States, as Polk insisted, the war could be justified, but if, as Lincoln suspected, it was in land that was rightfully Mexico’s, then Polk was guilty of unprovoked aggression. Although Lincoln later emphasized that he voted for troop supplies despite his opposition to the war, it was hard for him to escape criticism for what seemed to be unpatriotic nitpicking. He returned to Springfield as a frustrated politician, to be roused to meaningful action again only in 1854, when the passage of Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to spread slavery westward.
Omitted from this oft-repeated narrative is the fact that Lincoln’s two years in Washington were immensely valuable to his development. They saw him witnessing for the first time on a national scale the potentially crippling paradoxes of the American democratic experiment.
They also saw him discovering ways he might deal with these paradoxes, which were embedded in the very environment Lincoln and his family entered when on December 2, 1847, they arrived by train in Washington, DC. The city was an assemblage of grand buildings, scattered houses, and broad avenues crisscrossed by roads (most of them dirt) that stretched away indefinitely. For the visiting Charles Dickens, it was a “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, miles-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”60
Like the nation, the city was a paradox. It had been designed, as the architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant wrote to George Washington, to be the seat of a “vast empire,” but by 1847 that empire, expanding westward in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, seemed headed toward fracturing over slavery.61 The tension between the nation’s egalitarian ideals and its unjust practices was reflected in the contrast between the Capitol Building—the august center of democracy, constructed largely by free and enslaved blacks—and the city’s dozen or so slave pens, jails, and auction blocks, including the ever-crowded Williams Slave Pen and the busy Franklin and Armfield slave-trading firm, both of them near the Capitol.
The paradoxes of Washington played out in Congressman Lincoln’s private and political lives. After a short stay in the modest Indian Queen Hotel, he and his family moved into a boardinghouse across from the Capitol run by Mrs. Ann G. Sprigg and owned by the Democratic journalist Duff Green. Congressmen formed “messes” in such boardinghouses. Lincoln joined a Whig mess whose members differed in their views of slavery. Mrs. Sprigg’s was known as the Abolition House because of its antislavery heritage. It had served as an unofficial station on the Underground Railroad, and radicals like Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt had lived there. One of Lincoln’s fellow boarders was Joshua Giddings, the representative from Ohio who had become an antislavery icon when in 1842 he had broken the congressional gag rule on slavery. Giddings boldly voiced his abolitionist views, was censured by Congress, and resigned in protest but was soon reelected by a large margin. He returned to Washington and remained a thorn in the proslavery side until his congressional service ended in 1858. A Whig turned Republican, he supported Frémont in 1856 and four years later campaigned for Lincoln, who appointed him as the US consul to Canada in 1861.
Discussions over the long dinner table at Mrs. Sprigg’s often turned into debates over slavery. Along with Giddings and Lincoln, boarders strongly opposed to slavery included the Pennsylvania congressmen Abraham McIlvaine, a vehement critic of the Mexican War, and John Strohm, who presented antislavery petitions to Congress from Pennsylvania Quakers and called for the abolition of slavery in Washington, DC. Three other Pennsylvanians—James Pollock, John Blanchard, and John Dickey—took moderate positions, while Elisha Embree of Indiana was a conservative and Patrick Tompkins of Mississippi supported slavery. Often joining the conversation was Duff Green, who lived nearby and dined at the Sprigg establishment. A cantankerous Calhounite who criticized abolition, Green staunchly defended Southern rights.
Faced with these conflicts, Lincoln proved to be a skilled mediator. In his law practice, as we’ve seen, he discouraged litigation and recommended compromise. In politics, he esteemed, above all, Henry Clay, the Great Pacificator, whose biographer Nathan Sargent boarded at Mrs. Sprigg’s. Lincoln’s efforts to defuse hostility at the dinner table were highly successful. As another boarder, Dr. Samuel C. Busey, observed, Lincoln “may have been as radical” in his abolitionism as anyone present “but was so discreet in giving expression to his convictions on the slavery question as to avoid giving offence to anybody, and was so conciliatory as to create the impression, even among the proslavery advocates, that he did not wish to introduce or discuss subjects that would provoke a controversy.” Instead, he used his time-tested escape valves: storytelling and humor. Full of “amusing jokes, anecdotes, and witticisms,” Busey reported, Lincoln, when a discussion got hot, would “lay down his knife and fork, place his elbows upon the table, rest his face between his hands, and begin with the words ‘that reminds me,’ and proceed. Everybody prepared for the explosions sure to follow.” Provoking “a hearty and general laugh,” he would “so completely disarrange the tenor of the discussion that the parties engaged would either separate in good humor or continue conversation free from discord. This amicable disposition made him very popular with the household.”62
He continued the storytelling elsewhere. He often went to the busy mail room of the House of Representatives, where he told so many yarns that he was soon regarded as “the champion story-teller of the Capitol.”63 He carried on the performance at a nearby bowling alley. His comically awkward bowling style did not interfere with his enthusiasm for the game. In fact, it may have increased it, for his ungainly efforts at bowling, combined with his incessant storytelling, attracted crowds of spectators as he bowled—satisfying for one who thrived on assumed clownishness.
It was difficult to maintain clownishness—or seriousness, for that matter—in Congress, where even getting heard was a challenge. Sessions of the House of Representatives were chaotic. The House, which would not have its own chamber until a wing was added to the Capitol in 1857, met in a ninety-five-foot hall (later Statuary Hall) with green marble columns and a high, domed ceiling that reverberated with the representatives’ ceaseless chatter. As John J. Hardin, one of Lincoln’s Illinois predecessors in the House, lamented, “Of all the places to speak or to try & do any business, the Hall of the House is the worst I ever saw. I would prefer speaking in a pig pen with 500 hogs squealing . . . or talk to a mob when a fight is going on, . . . than to try to fix the attention of the House. Not one man in fifty can make himself heard on acc[oun]t of the construction of the Hall.”64 To make matters worse, Lincoln was assigned a poor seat—number 191—in the rear row of the Whig section, off to the left of the Speaker.
Despite the adverse conditions, Lincoln observed and learned from the congressional proceedings. He took his seat in the House on December 6, 1847, and maintained steady attendance throughout his term, making all but 13 of 456 roll calls. Lincoln “was attentive and conscientious in the discharge of his duties,” a fellow politician noted, “and followed the course of legislation closely.”65 He served industriously on two committees: Expenditures in the War Department and Post Offices and Post Roads.
Though he sat in the rear row, his height enabled him to see his colleagues. He was likely present when on February 21, 1848, the eighty-one-year-old antislavery congressman John Quincy Adams collapsed in the House chamber from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Adams died two days later. Lincoln helped organize his funeral and attended the service in the House on February 26.66
Lincoln’s experience in the House was unsettling in other ways as well. Just nine days after Lincoln took his seat, President Polk sent a message to Congress explaining why he had vetoed a bill, passed on March 3 (the last day of the previous congressional term), which had appropriated more than half a million dollars for harbor and river projects in several states. Polk had studied the report of the House Committee on Commerce and the Memorial of the Chicago Harbor and River Convention, which called for increased federal funding for rivers and harbors so that Congress could better regulate commerce, and found in them “a good deal of partisan bitterness, better suited to an irresponsible newspaper than to an official document.”67 In his veto message, an eight-thousand-word screed he worked on for several months, he laid out in detail his argument against federal funding of local improvements. Such funding, he insisted, was unconstitutional and, given the large expenses of the Mexican War, wasteful and deficit-increasing. The national government was under no obligation to support improvement projects that gave special benefits to particular states while excluding others.
And so the Chicago convention’s dream of national unity fostered by federally backed improvements was shattered by the president whose earlier veto of a similar bill had prompted the convention in the first place. Lincoln mulled over Polk’s message. His response came six months later in a June 8, 1848, speech before the House. Arguing that government-funded improvements were constitutional, he pointed to the redoubtable jurist Chancellor James Kent, who had unequivocally decided that, according to the Constitution, Congress, not the president, was responsible for regulating improvements. More important, amending the Constitution must not be taken lightly. Lincoln advised, “[L]et it stand as it is. New hands have never touched it. The men who made it, have done their work, and have passed away. Who shall improve, on what they did?”68 As for Polk’s contention that certain states received excessive benefits from federal funds, Lincoln said that was, to some degree, true of all federally backed improvements, even ones for seacoasts. At any rate, there was no separating local development from the national scene. Every meaningful improvement, even if confined to an individual state, benefited all Americans.
What’s notable about this speech was not only its typically Lincolnian message of unity—local improvements help the whole nation—but also its stylistic restraint. One could not tell from the
0 Comments